![]() You're never going to win the contingent respect game people like this are always in the middle of some pissing contest or other. But don't do it to impress people that treat you poorly. If you yourself want to learn a particular language, be awesome at a particular kind of game, or adopt a masculine self-presentation, terrific. This is just always a stupid useless horrible bargain to make. "I'll respect you if" - if you program in the programming language I admire, if you're good enough at first person shooters, if you behave like one of the guys, if you look down on feminine things. Sometimes people will offer you contingent respect. That doesn't mean it's a non-issue, but it does mean that calling it out and fixing it often means slow and sometimes kind of bureaucratic work. I'd say: cultivate resources, especially other women in similar jobs but different companies.īe aware that a great deal of what you'll encounter is not *conscious* sexism, but rather culture and infrastructure things that are designed around a default assumption that all employees are male. It's not always easy, but it's also not always horrible either. So I wanted to explore a little bit what it would mean to have been really intentionally created in this objectifying fashion. ![]() He makes a sculpted woman while he's retreated from any contact with *actual* women, whom he considers unfaithful and evil, and his Galatea remains such an object that he's never challenged on that view. People who retell it often focus on the idea that he was this wonderful sculptor and how miraculous it was that he was able to create something lifelike but in many of the Greek tellings, his initial character trait is that he's a huge misogynist. With Galatea I *was* to some extent reacting to the actual content of the myth of Pygmalion. I was working within a hobbyist field of interactive fiction creation that had much less connection with the rest of the video game world than it does now. I wasn't part of the industry at that point, and I was only fairly loosely aware of what was going on in AAA gaming in 2000 when I wrote Galatea I'd never owned a game console in my life. When I started writing characters in games, I was not reacting to the industry as such. I've heard a lot of stories from other women who have had a less smooth ride, unfortunately. I've pretty much always been applying for projects where at least some of the people there already knew who I was, and that's helped a lot. I got into IF as a hobby, then gradually started to be invited to do some columns and talks for game industry people, and so by the time I actually tried to make a career of it, I wasn't applying as an unknown applicant. That said, I personally have been enormously lucky. It wasn't until I'd actually been working on IF for a while and left a fairly gender-balanced academic discipline to do some industry work that I realized that, no, the sexism isn't quite the historical curiosity I might have hoped. So I grew up believing that I could do this stuff, and also that sexist expectations and practices must be largely in the past. And I got into interactive fiction because my parents had it on our computer at home. ![]() I spent way more time with construction toys than I did with dolls. Along the same lines, my parents bought me a variety of tech-y toys: a rock collection, a microscope, bug collection kits, a chemistry set, an electronics kit, train sets, those sorts of things. It didn't occur to me that these were unusual things for a woman to be doing. ![]() ![]() She was the one who gave astronomy courses at the local community college. When I was growing up, she was the one who knew how to program. My mother has always worked tech- and science-focused jobs. I came into this from a position of relative naiveté. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |